William Kentridge at Marian Goodman

For his most recent show at Marian Goodman, William Kentridge showed two 8-minute films from 2003, along with related charcoal drawings and a pair of very large (110 7/8-by-139 5/8-inch) multisheet letterpress prints. One of the films, Learning the Flute, is a "sketch" for an upcoming production of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which Kentridge will direct in 2005 at the Theatre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels. (His 1998 collaboration with this company and the Handspring Puppet Theater of Johannesburg, Il ritorno d'Ulisse by Monteverdi, premiered in New York at the same time the exhibition opened.) In the other film, Tide Table, Kentridge resurrects his alter ego, Soho Eckstein, the ruthless industrialist in pinstripes [see A.i.A., Jan. '99]. The artist also returns in this film purely to his animated charcoal drawings, rather than collaging in found film footage and shadow puppetry, as he did in Zeno Writing (2002).

Scored to two elegiac African songs, Tide Table shows Soho on the beach reading the financial pages near gently breaking waves. He falls asleep; perhaps he is dreaming. We see a small white boy making sand castles and tossing a stone into the sea, watched over by a black woman. A group of black congregants performs a full-immersion baptism; cattle surreally materialize in the surf. After officers survey the beach from the balcony of a nearby hotel, the film darkens in mood. The cattle decompose into skeletons. Workers are seen sleeping in a crowded dormitory that could also be a hospital. A man stands in the surf carrying another. The water rises, and when it recedes, he holds a body in a shroud.

Soho on vacation is letting go. The woman caresses his hand as he sleeps under his newspaper. Its pages blow away, one by one, becoming a carpet for her as she walks along, barefoot, a kind of tribute. We see the boy tossing a stone, then Soho doing likewise, and understand that they are the same person.

The disjunctions and lacunae in Kentridge's style allow his animations to brim with understated emotion while keeping sentimentality at bay. Scenes coalesce and dissolve in drifting pentimenti, as befits the theme of an inner eye trained on the past and on other ungraspable matters. These include race, which looms large yet, as always with Kentridge, is left unparsed. Figures like the woman and the man in the surf take on the quality of myth, the woman transhistorical in her trek across the financial pages and the corpse-carrying man transcultural, a kind of pieta that resonates all too familiarly with recent South African history. Soho's middle-age longing for something that has eluded him, the meaning hidden in these laconic emblems, or even the promise of youth, links him to matters bigger than himself, though they may be more inscrutable to him than they are to us. Kentridge relinquishes his characters to these larger forces, which means that they are always in the grip of an irony breathtaking in scope.

A more playful and formally experimental mood prevails in Learning the Flute. Kentridge is just the latest in a series of artists--David Hockney, Ingmar Bergman and Marc Chagall come to mind--to succumb to the charms of the fantastical beings and exotic setting of Mozart's opera. The video, which plays to the famous overture, is projected on a screen that looks like a blackboard, placed literally on an easel; and many of the animations unfold in energetic white linework, like chalk on a black ground. Images metamorphose through a naive cosmos at a rapid pace. Among the glyphlike phenomena are a falcon (one presumes Horus, as the setting is an Egyptian landscape and temple), shooting stars, metronomes that double as pyramids. Some of Kentridge's motifs have returned: a caged and pacing cat, here, aptly, a sphinx; spinning voussoirs decorated with classical vignettes; anthropomorphized objects, such as a drafting compass that picks itself up and walks away.

In Learning the Flute, Kentridge includes a slow-motion sequence of a conductor performing. A new alter ego? Given the example of the Monteverdi that was so pleasurably at hand, Learning the Flute whets one's appetite for a full-blown Kentridgean Mozart. [Tide Table is showing at the Rose Museum, Brandeis University, through Dec. 12.]

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